ACUTE: The First Twenty-Five Years, 1957–1982

Abstract

From the perspective of 1982, and an Association membership of over nine hundred, it is possible to look back with some satisfaction on the twenty-five years that have elapsed since that June Sunday in 1957 when eighty-two teachers of English from across Canada met with the Learned Societies at the University of Ottawa and voted to continue to meet on an annual basis as nation-wide professional organization. The decision filled need which had been felt for decades, and was the culmination of years of preliminary effort on the part of number of individuals whose lives and careers were interwoven with the development of English studies in Canada. ACUTE emerged partly out of other, broader-based organizations. The oldest of the Learned Societies, the Royal Society of Canada, had been founded in 1882 with the intention that it should, like its English and French prototypes, serve as focus for the intellectual life of the nation in both the arts and the sciences. In their 1947 study The Humanities in Canada, Watson Kirkconnell and A.S.P. Woodhouse recommended the establishment of an association dedicated more particularly to the humanities, and their suggestion resulted, in 1950-51, in the organizing of the Humanities Association of Canada (HAC). By this time, however, teachers of English--who were heavily represented in the Humanities Association--felt the need for still more specialized association. At the ACUTE dinner given in his honour in 1978, Clarence Tracy was to recall the situation of the English specialist before the founding of ACUTE. He spoke of the frustration he had himself felt, as young academic teaching on the prairies in the 1940s, in attempting to maintain his scholarly interests in isolation from colleagues with whom he could discuss them; of the lack of official encouragement of the discipline--the absence of travel and research grants, or indeed any form of financial support of the English scholar; of the scarcity of outlets for scholarly publication in Canada; and of the minority position of Canadian academics at the conventions of the Modern Language Association, the only meeting-place for Canadian scholars in the North American academic community. The 1957 meeting had been preceded by number of other attempts to organize national association of English professors. In the late 1920's there were two conferences held in the West; the University of Toronto and Dalhousie were represented at the second of these. The first national conference was held in Toronto in 1928, attracting representatives from UBC, Alberta, Manitoba, Dalhousie, Queen's, and Acadia, as well as from Toronto itself. It was not until 1950, however, that steps were taken towards setting up national organization which would meet on more regular basis. In that year, three Canadian delegates to the International Conference of University Professors of English at Oxford revived the idea of Canadian association. They were A.S.P. Woodhouse (Toronto), F.M. Salter (Alberta) and H.J. Alexander (Queen's). These three, joined by Roy Daniells (UBC) and Claude Bissell (Toronto), arranged what Clarence Tracy was later to call a dry run organized by Woodhouse and Co. in Toronto ... where, I think, I read my first 'learned' paper. This meeting, held in the spring of 1952, was funded by $2000 Rockefeller Foundation grant secured through the Humanities Research Council, by the University of Toronto itself, and by contributions from the other universities involved, each paying $30 per delegate towards travel fund (amounting to about $2000) which was then disbursed to individuals in proportion to the distance travelled (Some variation of this formula for sharing costs continued for years). Both President Sidney Smith of the University of Toronto, in his welcome to the delegates, and Professor Woodhouse, in his opening remarks, recalled the fine tradition of English studies in Canada, Smith suggesting that the decline of the classics was leading to the preeminence of English as the central humanities discipline. …